From Los Angeles
Becoming
Jane
by Jordan Riefe
When National Geographic approached Brett Morgen about directing a documentary on legendary primatologist Jane Goodall, he wouldn’t even consider it. There had been enough documentaries made on the trailblazing scientist and there seemed to be nothing more to say. First to agree with him was Goodall herself.
“I never thought another documentary could be new for me,” she told reporters at a recent press event for the new film “Jane” that looks at her research in Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park over 50 years ago. “It’s taken me back to those days more than any other movie that’s been done about me. It’s more about me, personally and my personal life. And the relationship with the chimpanzees is vivid.”
“Jane” was inspired by the 2014 discovery of 134 hours of 16 mm raw footage dating to the 1960s in the archives at National Geographic. “This footage was as historically relevant as the NASA moon landing footage,” Morgen tells PR for People about images shot by the man who would become Goodall’s husband, Hugo van Lawick. “What Hugo had documented was something that had never happened in the history of evolution and would never happen again and was shot in the most cinematic and poetic way possible.”
Goodall was just a middle-class teen with an abiding interest in wildlife when she went to stay with a friend in Africa back in the late 1950s. Acting on a casual suggestion, she cold-called eminent paleontologist Dr. Louis Leakey, who happened to be curator at the Nairobi National Museum at the time. With no formal training she was hired as a researcher. It might have been on account of Leakey’s fondness for young honey-blond assistants or his stated reason – he was looking for an observer unsullied by academia.
Gombe, Tanzania - Jane Goodall kisses her son Grub. (Jane Goodall Institute/Hugo van Lawick)